Category: Apps

Oh, I just love carrying around 40-pounds worth of cookbooks while I commute to and from work…said no one ever. Sure, print cookbooks are great, nothing can beat those large glossy photos and full-page ingredient lists, but they’re not the most practical reference guide when you have 10 minutes between work and the grocery store to figure out what’s for dinner tonight. Cooking apps to the rescue! With wireless Internet for tablets and other hand-held devices, cooking apps are like having a professional chef helping you in the comfort of your own kitchen.

Mario Batali Cooks

This app for regional Italian cuisine includes 63 of Batali’s most popular recipes, plus tons of videos on basic kitchen techniques. Batali is credited with creating 100 percent of the content himself. So if you ever wanted to take personal cooking lessons with a celebrity chef, the Mario Batali Cooks app gets you pretty darn close. The app features the ability to browse recipes according to prep-time, season, Italian region or kid-friendliness. Wine pairings and full images are included with every recipe. The cost of the app is $9.99, and it’s compatible with iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android.

Simply Organic Recipe Application

The Simply Organic app contains more than 1,400 recipes that feature organic foods. Search the database by ease of preparation, name, time or your personal ratings. With a single finger tap you can view a complete ingredient list, nutritional facts, chef suggestions and step-by-step instructions. Download the app for free on your iPad.

iCookbook

As the winner of the 2012 and 2013 Appy Awards, among many other prestigious tech awards, it’s safe to say iCookbook is “The Joy of Cooking” for a new generation. It’s made to appeal to everyday cooks who are preparing meals for families and want easy, delicious, healthful, budget-friendly recipes. iCookbook includes more than 2,000 recipes with new recipes available every month for free. The Meal Builder feature allows you to drag and drop recipes to create your own meals, and you can save all your favorites in My Recipe Box for easy access. This app is available on Windows 8, Android and Apple products — all for $4.99.

Grub Hub

Okay, it’s not technically a cooking app, but who wants to cook every night? With Grub Hub and the Internet, you can have a tasty meal delivered to your door any night of the week wherever you are. This clever app was invented by two hungry friends who were no doubt tired of sifting through junk drawer menus and racking their brains trying to remember the answer to the age old question: “Who delivers?” The Grub Hub site explains how easy to use their app really is: Enter your address, and the app lists all of the local restaurants that deliver. After ordering, you can track the progress of your dinner and even change your order if you’re quick enough. The app is free to use, and the site’s secure, meaning you don’t have to worry about paying with a credit card. Grub Hub is compatible with Apple products including iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Diana Baird

Diana is a nutritionist from Connecticut. When she’s not helping clients with dietary advice, she writes health and fitness articles for various blogs.

A special app has now been released in the hopes of helping to track down child predators.

The federal government has now released a new app that is meant to expand the mobile marketing that it is capable of achieving in order to help to locate child predators who are being sought in order to bring them to criminal prosecution.

The app is called “Operation Predator” and makes it simple to make reports of suspected local issues.

The app is focused on using mobile marketing to spread the word about people who are already being sought, as well as to make it easier for the public to be able to make a report of potential child exploitation that is going on in their own communities. This will allow the public to be able to work with the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be able to identify and find people who are suspected of being child predators.

This mobile marketing campaign and app are also meant to help to protect victims from further abuse.

By downloading this mobile marketing app, the American public can use it to make a direct phone call to the HSI tip line, can make an online submission of a tip, can help to identify some of the suspects on the most wanted lists, can read about the most recent arrests and investigations that are currently underway, and can receive alerts when there are new suspects being sought.

This is a new form of mobile marketing from ICE and could potentially pave the way for other organizations and other countries to use smartphones and apps for similar purposes. The acting Director of ICE, John Sandweg, explained that “When children are being sexually abused and exploited, it’s a race against the clock to rescue the child and bring the predator to justice.” He added that “These investigations are one of our highest priorities, and in today’s world, we need to be technologically savvy and innovative in our approach.”

Mobile marketing has the unique ability to reach people no matter where they are or what time it may be. This app helps to take advantage of the fact that the public won’t be required to watch a certain news program or read a specific news paper, or even actively seek out the information on a website in order to receive it.